Lyta
Human female, born LY 549, in Olek. Died 639. Wife of Dalton, mother of Natalia and Septimus. Member of the ELC. Circus performer. Lyta (pronounced ' 'lēt·ə') was always naturally athletic, and enjoyed playing various sports. One of her favorites was surfing, which had been introduced to The Land about two years before she was born. While the surfing off the coast of her native New Isle was perfectly good, she always heard that it was better off the coast of Sorret, where the sport had first started, so she hoped to travel there someday. (She also thought it would be fun to meet Sorreters and see them perform some magic.) Meanwhile, she was into many other sports, including gymnastics, a subword she had learned of from an ELC newsletter, which she had been subscribing to since she was a young girl. (In fact, gymnastics were not generally practiced on the Land, so there's little chance of her having heard of them any other way.) She was a girl of many interests, who took great pleasure in many aspects of youth, not just athletics, but also, obviously, reading. And she was a very upbeat person, with lots of good friends. She was also quite fond of many animals, of land, ocean, and air. One day in 564, at the age of 15, she was trying to think of some way to combine as many of her interests as possible. It seemed to her that people might enjoy a place where they could come to watch gymnastics, animals, magic, and perhaps other spectacles as well. That's when the subword circus first occurred to her. She immediately became very excited; she wrote down all that she could think of concerning the word's meaning, and then wrote a copy of these notes in a letter to the headquarters of the ELC, hoping it might be included in the next year's newsletter. But of greater interest to her was the possibility of actually creating a circus. Various other subwords occurred to her, including "acrobatics" (which seemed to her to be virtually synonymous with "gymnastics"), and also clowns. She soon convinced a number of friends and relatives to help her put together a circus, and when it quickly proved successful in her home village, her troupe hired a ship to ferry them to villages on the three nearby isles. In 565, they performed their circus in Ship, the first stop for them on First Land. Over the years, the circus would perform in every village of the Land, sometimes gaining new members of their troupe from the villages they visited. Lyta was particularly excited when a Sorreter named Dalton joined them during their first visit to Sorret in 568. Three years later, at the age of 22, Lyta married Dalton. In 574, they had a daughter named Natalia, and in 578, they had a son named Septimus. In 589, at the age of 40, Lyta switched from performing acrobatics to becoming her circus's new ringmaster. In early 598, she read a book called Landian Alchemy, a gift from Dalton. This made her very interested in the possibility of acquiring mythical creatures for the circus, and later that year they began transporting manticores from northern Near Land to New Isle. The first of them was transported in a special wagon she'd had commissioned by a Tanquer cartwright named Vardo, and the wagon would then be used in transporting the manticore between villages, wherever the circus traveled. Other manticores would subsequently be transported to New Isle by translocation. Lyta continued in her position as ringmaster until retiring at the age of 70. However, she continued traveling with the circus until her death, twenty years later. Category:People